This study assessed the impact and effectiveness of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks during a period of about four months of the Russo-Ukrainian war, by observing the exchanges between the opposing sides. The data collection phase took place between the 28thof November 2022 and the 15thof April 2023. In total, we monitored 1,257 websites and web applications targeted in the conflict, with 633 targeted by pro-Russian and 624 by pro-Ukrainian entities. Only a small fraction (1.27%) of the targets remained unaffected, whereas 30.63% faced complete shutdowns. When considering the extent of the attacks conducted by the belligerents in the war, the attacks by pro-Russian entities showed a slightly more successful overall impact, with 36.18% of their targets were taken down, compared to 25.00% on the opposite side. Businesses demonstrated greater resilience against DDoS attacks compared to governmental and educational institutions. An in-depth analysis revealed significant differences in target categories, despite both sides primarily targeting businesses. Our findings regarding the usage of DDoS protection services among the 1,257 analysed targets showed that only 13.37% used such services. Among these minority of users, 70.24% had protection from the beginning of our analysis, while 29.76% adopted it only after experiencing attacks. We also looked into the use of geolocation-based access policies on websites targeted by pro-Ukrainian entities. Our findings indicated that most of these websites do not implement geolocation-based access restrictions. To an extent, such restrictions could have been useful for preventing some unsophisticated attacks. Surprisingly, only a small percentage (4.50%) restricted access to solely Russian addresses, while a fraction (12.56%) seemed to implement adaptive access policies in response to cyberattacks. Lastly, and quite surprisingly for us, we discovered that a significant number of targets on the Russian side were using anti-DDoS services and technology provided by countries that have for a long time imposed economic and commercial sanctions on Russia. This may or may not be strictly illegal, but it is without question against the spirit of these sanctions.

As the economic hubs of (potentially) illegal transactions, dark web markets are fraught with uncertainty, including their ending. The ending of a dark web market can bring disruption to the stakeholders involved, especially vendors and buyers. Most importantly, there is a growing concern that such an ending can cause financial repercussions or even fraud victimisation. At the moment, there is scant published work about how, why or when dark web markets would end. We aim to fill this gap to help the academic and security research communities to reflect on what would typically happen to dark web markets in their final days. We used crawling and data scraping techniques to gather relevant weekly data from six dark web markets over a span of several months, right up to their closure. We then analysed the data to find common characteristics and predictive features leading to the closure of these markets. We found three main reasons for the ending of dark web markets: (i) exit scam, (ii) voluntary closure, or (iii) taken down by Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs). We also gained further insights by analysing our data more closely. For instance, markets are most likely to be closed down when they are most visible, when they are under attack or when they are growing rapidly to their peak. In particular, more mature markets (i.e. markets that have been in operation for a long period of time) are more likely to disappear when their economic patterns start to change (for example, there might be a rapid growth or a sudden – or even gradual, but noticeable – economic decline). When a market was closed down, vendors and buyers would typically move on quickly to other alternative markets – which might grow rapidly as a result – and in turn, those alternative markets’ risk of being closed down would become higher. Whether a market is still accepting new vendors (or not) appears to be a valuable indicator for predicting the market’s next move. These insights can be useful in anticipating potential market closure, so that sufficient warning can be provided to avoid people being victimised.

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are used in many facets of modern life, from smart homes to smart cities, including Internet-enabled healthcare systems and industrial control systems. The prevalence and ubiquity of IoT devices makes them extremely attractive targets for malicious actors, in particular for taking control of vulnerable devices and demand ransom from their owners. The aim of this paper is twofold: to investigate the viability of a ransomware-type attack being carried out on IoT devices; and to explore what damage can be inflicted upon devices after they have been compromised. To test whether ransomware is a viable method for attacking IoT devices, we developed our own proof of concept malware for Linux-based IoT devices dubbed "PaperW8". We looked at feasible ways for infecting IoT devices, as well as potential methods for gaining control and applying persistent changes to the target device. We successfully created a proof of concept ransomware, which we tested against six vulnerable IoT devices of various brands and functions, some of which are known to have been targeted in the past but are still widely in use today. Developing this proof of concept tool allowed us to identify the main requirements for a successful ransomware attack against IoT devices. We also determined some limitations of IoT devices that may discourage attackers from developing IoT-specific ransomware, while highlighting workarounds that more determined attackers may use to overcome these obstacles. This paper has demonstrated that IoT ransomware is a credible threat. We implemented a proof of concept tool that can compromise many IoT devices of varying types. We envisage that this work can be used to assist current and future IoT developers to improve the security of their devices, and also to help security researchers in implementing more effective ransomware countermeasures, including for IoT devices.

Ransomware is a form of malware designed to prevent access to data by either locking out the victims from their system or encrypting some or all of their files until a ransom has been paid to the attacker. Victims would know that they had been hit by ransomware because a ransom demand (splash screen) would be displayed on their compromised device. This study aims to identify key user interface features of ransomware splash screens and see how these features affect victims' likelihood to pay, and how this information may be used to create more effective countermeasures to mitigate the threat of ransomware. We devised an experiment that contained three broad types of splash screens (Text, Time-Sensitive Counter, and Other). A total of nine splash screens were shown to each participant, from which data on the participants' eye behaviour were collected. After each splash screen, participants were also asked a set of questions that would help describe their experience and be cross-referenced with the eye tracking data to aid analysis. Our experiment collected quantitative eye tracker data and qualitative data regarding willingness to pay from 25 participants. Several key components of the splash screens such as the text, logo, images, and technical information were analysed. Comments from the participants on whether they would pay the ransom or not, and the reasons behind their decision were also recorded. We found that there is no clear indication that one type of splash screen would have a higher chance of success with regard to ransom payment. Our study revealed that there are some characteristics in splash screens that would strongly discourage some victims from paying. Further investigation will be carried out in this direction, in order to design and develop more effective countermeasures to ransomware.

In this paper we present an attack, which allows fraudulent transactions to be collected from EMV contactless credit and debit cards without the knowledge of the cardholder. The attack exploits a previously unreported vulnerability in EMV protocol, which allows EMV contactless cards to approve unlimited value transactions without the cardholder's PIN when the transaction is carried out in a foreign currency. For example, we have found that Visa credit cards will approve foreign currency transactions for any amount up to ∈999,999.99 without the cardholder's PIN, this side-steps the £20 contactless transaction limit in the UK. This paper outlines our analysis methodology that identified the flaw in the EMV protocol, and presents a scenario in which fraudulent transaction details are transmitted over the Internet to a "rogue merchant" who then uses the transaction data to take money from the victim's account. In reality, the criminals would choose a value between ∈100 and ∈200, which is low enough to be within the victim's balance and not to raise suspicion, but high enough to make each attack worthwhile. The attack is novel in that it could be operated on a large scale with multiple attackers collecting fraudulent transactions for a central rogue merchant which can be located anywhere in the world where EMV payments are accepted.

There are various technologies that can be used to improve road safety, but they tend to be self-contained and do not interact much with other technologies. This might provide sufficient service as such, but we believe better systems can be developed if we allow these technologies to collaborate and share information with each other. This paper outlines the work we have carried out within the EU-funded TRACKSS project in order to allow two sensing technologies (near-infrared camera and smart dust) to work together, especially in developing more robust V2Vand I2V safety applications.

Building open distributed systems is an even more challenging task than building distributed systems, as their components are loosely synchronised, can move, become disconnected, and their behaviour may depend on the changing context. The approach we are putting forward relies on using a combination of formal methods applied for rigorous development of the critical parts of the system and a set of design abstractions proposed specifically for the open context-aware applications and supported by a special middleware. Our middleware provides system structuring through the concepts of roles, agents, locations and scopes, making it easier for application developers to achieve fault tolerance. We demonstrate our approach using a case study, in which we show the whole process of developing an ambient campus application - an example of open distributed systems - including its formal specification, refinement, and implementation.

Developing fault tolerant ambient systems requires many challenging factors to be considered due to the nature of such systems, which tend to contain a lot of mobile elements that change their behavior depending on the surrounding environment, as well as the possibility of their disconnection and reconnection. It is therefore necessary to construct the critical parts of fault tolerant ambient systems in a rigorous manner. This can be achieved by deploying formal approach at the design stage, coupled with sound framework and support at the implementation stage. In this paper, we briefly describe a middleware that we developed to provide system structuring through the concepts of roles, agents, locations and scopes, making it easier for the developers to achieve fault tolerance. We then outline our experience in developing an ambient lecture system using the combination of formal approach and our middleware